I upgraded a MacBook Pro laptop that was running
OS X El
Capitan to macOS High Sierra (10.13.6) this week. The laptop was
running Apache webserver software. After the upgrade, the system
wasn't listening on port 80 for
HTTP connections, but I was able to start it listening
again with sudo apachectl start.
$ netstat -a | grep http | grep LISTEN $ sudo apachectl start Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': $ netstat -a | grep http | grep LISTEN tcp46 0 0 *.http *.* LISTEN $
I was then able to access the default webpage at http://localhost which
displayed the page contained in index.html.en file in the
DocumentRoot directory at
/Library/WebServer/Documents, but whenever I attempted to display
pages I had created elsewhere, I kept getting a "404 Not Found" page indicating
the requested URL was not found on the server. When I checked
/private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, I found it had
a April 4, 2018 timestamp, but no longer had the virtual host information I
had previously put in the file.
$ ls -l /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1519 Apr 4 2018 /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf $
However, the previous version of the file was still in the dirctory with
a ~previous appended to the filename.
$ ls -l /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf~previous -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1373 Dec 15 2017 /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf~previous $
I was thus able to copy the previous version of the file over the new
httpd-vhosts.conf file after saving the new version to another
location in case I needed to reference it again.
$ sudo cp -a /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf~previous /private/etc/ apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': $
The /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file that is the main configuration
file for Apache was also replaced during the operating system (OS) upgrade.
The prior version also was preserved with httpd.conf~previous
appended to it.
$ ls -l /etc/apache2/httpd.conf -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 21150 Mar 13 14:29 /etc/apache2/httpd.conf $ ls -l /etc/apache2/httpd.conf~previous -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 20497 Feb 27 2018 /etc/apache2/httpd.conf~previous $
Since the new version was missing the changes I had made previously
to have Apache load the virtual hosts file and support Perl and Python
scripts, after copying the new version of httpd.conf to a
location where I could preserve it if I needed to reference it again,
I copied that prior version over top of the httpd.conf
file placed on the system during the upgrade and restarted the Apache
web server.
$ sudo cp /etc/apache2/httpd.conf~previous /etc/apache2/httpd.conf Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': $ sudo apachectl restart Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': $
But Apache wasn't listening for connections after I attempted to restart it,
though I hadn't seen any error message. When I used the configtest
option for apachectl, I saw that Apache couldn't load a module for
PHP.
$ sudo apachectl restart Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': $ netstat -a | grep http | grep LISTEN $ sudo apachectl configtest Enter PIN for 'Certificate For PIV Authentication (JAMES CAMERON)': httpd: Syntax error on line 169 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Cannot load libexec/apache2/libphp5.so into server: dlopen(/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so, 10): image not found $
So I commented out the line that loaded that PHP module in
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf by putting a # at the
beginning of the line. I didn't even have to issue an apachectl command
again to start it listening on port 80 after I commented out the line.
$ netstat -an | grep 80 | grep LISTEN tcp46 0 0 *.80 *.* LISTEN $ netstat -a | grep http | grep LISTEN tcp46 0 0 *.http *.* LISTEN $
But then, when I attempted to view PHP pages, the PHP code on the pages would
be displayed rather than executed. So I then looked in the version of the
httpd.conf that was installed during the OS upgrade process that
I had saved and found the following line:
I replaced the line referring to libphp5.so with the above line,
removing the pound sign, i.e., the #, so the module would be
loaded and then restarted Apache with sudo apachectl restart.
The PHP code then was executed on PHP pages.
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